[rarestia]

BA English Comp, minor in psych here.

Working on MA in Technical Communication.

I have a well-paying, non-management job, no debt, a house, a paid-for car, and I am working on getting married.

Liberal arts degrees are not occupational death sentences. I am an engineer with no engineering education, and I run circles around the engineers with degrees in engineering.

Hard science and math degrees only mean you can manipulate numbers. Writing and communication is infinitely more important to an employer. I learned all of my engineering skills on the job and through reading.

[gr8eman]

Writing and communication is infinitely more important to an employer

True, if you can comprehend the numbers you manipulate.

[bobjam]

Most universities have general education requirements that apply to all majors. The problem with liberal arts is that the colleges have done a poor job marketing their product and, in many cases, have been taken over by activists. Students don’t want to spend four years being lectured by aging hipsters who still talk about Woodstock or the day they burned their draft cards.

Attitudes have also changed. In the past, college was the place for a young man or woman to “find himself while broadening his horizons”. After four years, they go to law school, med school, MBA or other education.

Today, students enter college with the goal of getting a degree that will land them a well paying job upon graduation. Henry V is nice, but neither the play nor the king will go as far as top skills in PowerPoint and Photoshop when applying for the entry level position at an marketing agency.

[thulldud]

I have never used my college training for a job. Every job I have had has grown out of a hobby. To wit, my degree is "B.A. in Biblical Education", but my first "real" job was in commercial radio communications, and today I am a software developer.

I learned how to think and communicate in college. How to work, I learned by doing the work.

I could have done much worse.

[piytar]

“Hard science and math degrees only mean you can manipulate numbers.”

Utterly wrong. Engineering is about manipulating numbers - to solve problems. Hard science is about manipulating numbers - to answer questions about reality. When you denigrate those as “only ... manipulating numbers,” that shows you don’t really understand engineering, and further that what you think is engineering isn’t.

PS I’m talking real science and engineering, not the politicized garbage we see all the time in the media such as global warming etc.